eircom backhaul problems

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 26-10-2014 06:46PM #1

eircom backhaul problems have been going on too long. for the past month, at peak times and Sundays (especially today) the bandwidth has been crap. the bottleneck seems to be the backhaul and using tracert it seems to be their London servers.

if you do a speedtest, it connects to the closest server so speeds are usually great. it's only when you're streaming stuff from the US, it's terrible.

anyone finding the same?

primalux · 26-10-2014 07:43PM

Yes, absolute crap today.

ZephyrSurfer · 26-10-2014 08:33PM

It's ridiculous that such an issue could
a) As extreme as it is
b) Persist as long as it has

Crazy carry on there.

swiftblade · 26-10-2014 08:52PM

Youtube is unusable tonight. As in, videos won't even load.

Dailymotion and other sites are fine.

I'd love to hear eircom try and talk their way out of this one.

_dof_ · 26-10-2014 09:19PM

georgiecasey wrote: »

eircom backhaul problems have been going on too long. for the past month, at peak times and Sundays (especially today) the bandwidth has been crap. the bottleneck seems to be the backhaul and using tracert it seems to be their London servers.

if you do a speedtest, it connects to the closest server so speeds are usually great. it's only when you're streaming stuff from the US, it's terrible.

anyone finding the same?

Yes, it's bad tonight, I was trying to lad a stream hosted by livestream.com and won't load when connecting directly, but when I turn on zenmate in chrome to go via a VPN, it loads perfectly.

Your point about the backhaul problems in London seem to hit the nail on the head. I tried a few speedtests, in one I selected Gloucester server, and it was working fine, giving me full download speeds, which for me is 26Mb/sec, but when I select the one in London, it drops to 8Mb/sec, and pings were taking twice as long, 121ms

Zatoichi · 26-10-2014 09:25PM

Any of you changed the default ericom DNS to a public one to see if it helps?

_dof_ · 26-10-2014 09:33PM

Zatoichi wrote: »

Any of you changed the default ericom DNS to a public one to see if it helps?

I changed to the google one fairly soon after I got efibre cos the eircom one was soooo slow, it was taking ages to load web pages, displaying "Waiting for <whatever hostname>" at the bottom of the chrome page...

Changing to the goolge DNS improved it, but even with that sometimes it takes ages to load some pages..

Update:
I can stream HD on youtbe without buffering at the moment, so it seems the immediate problem with youtube is solved but it's very hit and miss.

Livestream still not loading the stream without loading zenmate VPN though

_dof_ · 26-10-2014 09:37PM

and not livestream is working again....

I hate these intermittent problems, even when they happen frequently, because you know when you call up tech support the problem won't be there at the time....

Zatoichi · 26-10-2014 09:43PM

I get sub 30ms in most UK servers and around 65Mbps, except for the bottom London server on speedtest. Get a ping of 112ms and barely 10Mbps. Even with that I can't even get a youtube video running at all.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 26-10-2014 09:47PM

surely if it is just a london server congestion issue, it's an easy fix, just upgrade the hardware in London. it's been like this for at least a month. bad sign from eircom and future investement that they haven't bothered to fix this.

conorkvngh · 26-10-2014 09:56PM

So would anyone be able to tell me how I can slightly fix this? Or is there no fix?

_dof_ · 26-10-2014 10:01PM

conorkvngh wrote: »

So would anyone be able to tell me how I can slightly fix this? Or is there no fix?

I downloaded the zenmate extension for chrome brower, it gives you a VPN, and you can select the location for the far endpoint of the VPN, I selected London as the location. So Zenmates sets itself up as a proxy and sends all my browser traffic through its server in London.

That route must avoid the congested part that Eircom's traffic normally goes through becuase it works find when I enable Zenmate. When I turn it off again, and try to connect directly, it slows down or hangs, with buffering in streams etc.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 26-10-2014 10:08PM

ah cheers _dof_, i nevr thought of that. i'm connected to a squid proxy on my french OVH server and getting 50Megabits down and perfect gamepass stream! crazy that it's way more stable than eircom!

ED E · 26-10-2014 11:02PM

georgiecasey wrote: »

surely if it is just a london server congestion issue, it's an easy fix, just upgrade the hardware in London. it's been like this for at least a month. bad sign from eircom and future investement that they haven't bothered to fix this.

Not necessarily theirs, ISPs networks only go so far until your traffic hits a Tier 1.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup · 27-10-2014 04:50AM

it's 5am and i can't load stackoverflow.com through eircom. works no problem via my VPN.

i checked DNS, and both my server and PC resolve it to IP of 198.252.206.16

something seriously wrong with their network.

ekimiam · 27-10-2014 05:01AM

thats it, im finding an alternative on tuesday ! they have been useless for far to long

Spear · 27-10-2014 11:53AM

This sounds more like a peering saturation issue rather than backhaul. If it were the latter everything would be impacted.

mememo · 27-10-2014 01:15PM

This is a joke today i cant even connect to some of my favorite sites without using a VPN I'm going to demand Eircom wave my broadband fees for this month tomorrow when i phone them

jantheman91 · 27-10-2014 01:57PM

Can't load youtube videos in 360p with 90 download.

It's actually ridiculous.

Cutting corners again, typical Eircom.

Mayo Yid · 27-10-2014 02:04PM

jantheman91 wrote: »

.

Cutting corners again, typical Eircom.

And you know this, how?

loyatemu · 27-10-2014 05:23PM

Eircom peer with Google in Dublin: https://www.inex.ie/ixp/peering-matrix - YouTube traffic would use this link (interestingly UPC don't peer with Google at INEX).

Just because a particular SpeedTest server in London is giving slow results is meaningless, that server is hosted on someone else's network and the latency issue could be anywhere.

Having said all that, I've found access to all sorts of sites (including the likes of Amazon) desperately slow through Eircom this last week, so there clearly is an issue somewhere.

ED E · 27-10-2014 05:29PM

loyatemu wrote: »

Eircom peer with Google in Dublin: https://www.inex.ie/ixp/peering-matrix - YouTube traffic would use this link (interestingly UPC don't peer with Google at INEX).

Just because a particular SpeedTest server in London is giving slow results is meaningless, that server is hosted on someone else's network and the latency issue could be anywhere.

Having said all that, I've found access to all sorts of sites (including the likes of Amazon) desperately slow through Eircom this last week, so there clearly is an issue somewhere.

Googles CDN for youtube isnt necessarily in Dublin though. More likely france due to cheaper power rates.

INEX is pretty small fry nowadays, check our their usage stats. Most of the time the links are pretty idle.

Hank Scorpio · 27-10-2014 08:39PM

It's so annoying. Check out how bad their network is

Certain apps/games the dl speed is like 5kb/s , I'm on 24 meg

Spear · 27-10-2014 09:00PM

nuxxx wrote: »

It's so annoying. Check out how bad their network is

Certain apps/games the dl speed is like 5kb/s , I'm on 24 meg

That's fairly meaningless in this context. It's common for backbone switches to drop or deprioritize ICMP traffic like that, it doesn't mean there's an issue.

ED E · 27-10-2014 09:00PM

Lines 7 8 and 9 point to the culprit.

That said, in a problem scenario ICMP (Ping and traceroutes) are the first packets to be dropped so its not a hard and fast way to diagnose.

ItHurtsWhenIP · 27-10-2014 09:27PM

Spear wrote: »

That's fairly meaningless in this context. It's common for backbone switches to drop or deprioritize ICMP traffic like that, it doesn't mean there's an issue.

You are bang on there. The only truly meaningful Packet Loss result is what is given at the final hop because as you say intermediate switches and firewalls will typically ignore ICMP.

Hank Scorpio · 27-10-2014 09:33PM

Is this meaningless too? I mean the two points where the program says PL occurs is where the latency spikes. From Dublin to Eircoms node in London and onto France again

Spear · 27-10-2014 09:37PM

nuxxx wrote: »

Is this meaningless too? I mean the two points where the program says PL occurs is where the latency spikes. From Dublin to Eircoms node in London and onto France again

The jump in latency is far more likely to be a reflection of the physical distance there, since it jumps with the hope between Dublin and London. But again you can see two hops completely discarding ICMP traffic.

Hank Scorpio · 27-10-2014 09:39PM

Spear wrote: »

The jump in latency is far more likely to be a reflection of the physical distance there, since it jumps with the hope between Dublin and London. But again you can see two hops completely discarding ICMP traffic.

When eircoms network was going OK over the summer there wasn't jumps in latency like that or any PL, they were all consistently in the mid twenties 24/7

ItHurtsWhenIP · 27-10-2014 09:50PM

nuxxx wrote: »

Is this meaningless too? I mean the two points where the program says PL occurs is where the latency spikes. From Dublin to Eircoms node in London and onto France again

I'm only guessing here, but from years of looking at PingPlotter graphs in a large corporate environment, I'm very familiar with reading the graphs. Ping Plotter documentation also points this out.

My guess is that Hop 4 is in Ireland as Hop 6 is in the UK, so there is a switch at Hop 5 there that is configured to drop ICMP (as pings consumes CPU cycles and the switch has more important things to be doing than replying to pings). Similarly Hop 8 is in France so there must be another switch at Hop 7 doing the same thing.

The increase in latency is simply down to the greater "distance" that the ping is traveling as it traverses international borders.

Hank Scorpio · 27-10-2014 10:33PM

I accept the point that switches are capable of dropping icmp packets, my initial point was outside of peak hours my pings are much lower and consistently in the 20s as I have fastpath enabled on my line. The above server for example pings 25ms offpeak but during peak hours anywhere from 60-200. I don't want to drag the thread off topic

Hopefully they can fix the issues, its so frustrating not being able to game on a stable connection past 6pm everyday

There's alot of people complaining here http://community.eircom.net/t5/Broadband/bd-p/32

eircom backhaul problems

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